The invention relates to a non-rotary printing machine particularly applicable to recycled precision imprinting of specially characterized information on web material, which may be continuous web, moving continuously through the machine. More specifically, the invention is applicable to printed insertion of limited composition onto base-printed documents, i.e., those which have already been printed with static or master format, as for example letterheads, billheads, greeting cards, bank checks, hospital forms, and other administrative or commercial papers, as to which documents merely a line or a limited number of lines of further identifying content is to be added for specific localized or personal use.
In today's increasingly automated business world, wherein checks and other business documents must be printed with machine-readable characters, as in the case of the MICR system, strict registration standards must be adhered to, and the demand is for faster production, quicker set-up time, minimum stock (web) waste, and use of less-skilled operators--in short, further cost reduction in regard to machine investment and space requirements, without sacrifice of the foregoing other requirements.
A machine which has been able to satisfy most of the foregoing and other requirements is as described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,254,596, wherein provision is made for the machine to accept feed of web material via a selected one of two orthogonally related feed systems having parts which intersect in a printing zone between a printing-head unit and a printing-hammer unit. Necessarily, this existing machine must be relatively massive, complex and expensive, involving as it does, two feed systems on different directional alignments, and all the drive coordination, phase and marginal adjustments, etc. that must be at least in duplicate (and suitably interconnected or interconnectable) to assure requisite synchronization and other aspects of a precision job, whatever the selected orthogonal direction of web feed.